“As a humorist, Mr. Lewis makes valiant attempts to be funny; he merely succeeds in being silly. In fact, it is as yellow a novel as novel can be.”
Boston Evening Transcript
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
(Aside: Have you seen I Am Not Your Negro, the documentary about James Baldwin’s abandoned book, Remember This House? It’s a fine film, richly deserving of all the fulsome praise it has garnered. I highly recommend it.)
“The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”
James Baldwin “The Negro Child—His Self Image” in The Saturday Review (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“As the publishers say, it is a sympathetic and understanding study of a young man struggling with his soul. It might be even more sympathetic if Author Bellow (who is not in the Army) ever seemed to suspect that, as an object of pity, his hero is a pharisaical stinker.”
Time
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
“He is a shallow, affected, self-conscious fribble–so there.”
Vita Sackville-West, letter to Harold Nicolson, 1959
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
A couple of days ago I posted a context clues worksheet on the adjective abstract. For high school students, especially the college bound, this is a key concept and word.
To take it further, here is a lesson plan on concrete and abstract nouns.
To begin this lesson, you might want to use (that is, if you don’t incorporate the aforementioned context clues worksheet on abstract, which I should probably do myself), you might find this Everyday Edit worksheet on The Empire State useful. This scaffolded worksheet on using concrete and abstract nouns is the mainstay of the lesson; this teacher’s copy of the worksheet will make the lesson a bit easier to deliver.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Every government is run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Portable Curmudgeon. New York: Plume, 1992.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged united states history
“In attempting to depict the boredom of human existence, he has run the very grave risk of thoroughly boring his reader.”
San Francisco Chronicle
“The suggestion that something larger is being said about the human predicament…won’t hold water, any more than Beckett’s incontinent heroes can.”
The Spectator
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
“Religious tolerance, mutual respect between vocational groups, belief in the rights of the individual, are among the virtues that the best of our high schools now foster.”
James Bryant Conant (1893-1978) as quoted in The Teacher and the Taught (1963)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“I can assure the American public that the errors in Johnson’s Dictionary are ten times as numerous as they suppose; and that the confidence now reposed in its accuracy is the greatest injury to philology that now exists.”
Noah Webster, letter, 1807
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“His characters are as shallow as the saucers in which they stack their daily emotions, and instead of interpreting his material–or even challenging it–he has been content merely to make a carbon copy of a not particularly significant surface life of Paris.”
The Dial
“…leaves one with the feeling that the people it describes really do not matter; one is left at the end with nothing to digest,”
The New York Times
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities, readings/research
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